The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [203]
“I—” Remmer clenched a fist. “—don’t know either. . . .”
“You don’t.”
“No.”
“I think you do.”
The room was deathly silent. There were four men in it and not one moved. They barely breathed. Then Osborn thought he saw Remmer take a step backward.
“Come on, Manfred McVey said lightly. But it wasn’t intended lightly. He’d hit a nerve and he’d meant to, and it had caught Remmer off guard.
“It’s unfair, Manfred, I know,” McVey said quietly. “But I’m asking anyway. Because it just might help.”
“McVey, I can’t—”
“Yes you can.”
Remmer glanced around the room. “Weltanschauung,” he said in a voice just above a whisper. “Hitler’s view of life. That it was an eternal struggle where only the strongest survived and the strongest of the strong ruled. To him, the Germans had once been the strongest of the strong. Therefore destined to rule. But that strength had become weakened over the generations because the true (Germans race mixed with others far less superior. Hitler believed that throughout history the mixing of bloodlines was the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures. That was why Germany lost the first war, because the Aryan had already given up the purity of his blood. To Hitler, the Germans were the highest species on earth and could again become what they once were—but only through exceedingly careful breeding.”
The hotel room had become a theater with an audience “of three, and Remmer the sole actor on the stage. He stood with his shoulders thrown back. His eyes glistened and sweat stood out on his forehead. His voice had risen from a whisper to an oratory so concise it seemed, for the moment, to have been learned. Or, more rightly, learned, and then consciously forgotten.
“At the beginning of the Nazi movement, there were eighty-some million Germans; within a hundred years he envisioned two hundred and fifty million, maybe more. For that, Germany would need Lebensraum—living space, a lot of it, enough to assure the nation room for total freedom of existence on its own terms. But living space and the soil beneath it, Hitler said, exist only for the people who possess the force to take them. By this, he meant that the new Reich must again set itself along the road of the Teutonic knights. Obtain by the German sword sod for the German plow, and bread for the German stomach.”
“So they set themselves back on the straight and narrow by wiping out six million Jews to keep them from sleeping around?” McVey sounded like an old country lawyer, as if somehow he’d missed something and didn’t get it. He played it light because he knew Remmer would push back, defending what had happened. Defending his guilt.
“You have to understand what was going on. This was after a shattering defeat in World War One: the Treaty of Versailles had taken away our dignity, there was huge inflation, mass unemployment. Who was going to challenge a leader who was giving us back our pride and self-respect?— He enamored us and we became swept up in it, lost in it. Look at the old films, the photographs. Look at the faces of the people. They loved their Führer. They loved his words and the fire behind them. And because of that, it was totally forgotten that they were the words of an uneducated, demented man—” Remmer’s expression went blank and he stopped, as if he’d suddenly forgotten his train of thought.
“Why?” McVey hissed like an offstage prompter. “We’ve had the history lesson, Manfred. Now tell us the truth. Why did you get swept up in Hitler’s words? Why did you get lost in the ideas of and passion of an uneducated, demented man? You’re blaming it all on one guy.
Remmer’s eyes darted around the room. He’d gone as far as he could, or would.
“The Nazis were more than Hitler, Manfred.” McVey was no longer the old country lawyer who didn’t get it, he was a voice piercing Remmer’s subconscious, demanding he dig deeper. “Powerful as he was, it wasn’t just him—”
Remmer was staring at the floor. Slowly he raised his “head, and when he did his eyes were filled with horror. “Like a religion,